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<\/p>\n\n\tIt\u2019s 5:45 a.m. on a Tuesday, and the Home Depot on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood is already bustling.\u00a0\u00a0I am standing in Aisle 18 \u2014 deep in the lumber section of the cavernous space \u2014 evaluating formulations of plaster compound.\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019ve been sent here to get a 50-pound bag of \u201c40 minute,\u201d a box of \u201cred dot,\u201d a box of \u201cgreen dot,\u201d a roll of drywall tape and a roll of \u201cfrog\u201d tape. To be clear, I don\u2019t know what any of these things are.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe last time I was up this early for work, I was on the set of\u00a0Cooper\u2019s Bar\u00a0(the Emmy-nominated sitcom I co-created for AMC), trying to convince our star, Rhea Seehorn, that one of the jokes I had written for her character would be funnier if she said the words \u201cface anus\u201d instead of her preferred choice, \u201cface hole.\u201d\u00a0(Rhea, to her endless credit, ultimately agreed.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIn the intervening months, Hollywood had suffered an actors\u2019 strike, a writers\u2019 strike, a spiraling production exodus and a content contraction precipitated by the economics of streaming and the rise of creators on media platforms like YouTube and TikTok. I lost my job working at a production company, and my show got cancelled. After a 30-year career in Hollywood where I held executive positions at companies like Anschutz Entertainment Group and Phoenix Pictures\u00a0\u00ad\u2014 where I wrote, produced and directed award-winning movies and TV like\u00a0Ray\u00a0and\u00a0Afternoon Delight \u2014 I am now a construction worker.<\/p>\n
\n\tLike going broke \u2014 as Hemingway famously quipped \u2014 my construction career happened gradually and then all at once.\u00a0\u00a0I spent the first year after getting laid off holding on to the Hollywood dream. My old company, Whitewater Films, hired me to write a sports comedy \u2014\u00a0Puckheads\u00a0\u2014 about an aging minor league hockey enforcer who gets coerced into playing for a cartel in Mexico City. Everyone loved the script.\u00a0Ian Jeffers (The Grey) and I wrote a supernatural pilot about special ops forces in post-WW2 Germany tracking Hitler\u2019s nukes. Everyone loved the script!! I wrote a contained horror film,\u00a0The Vegetable, I planned to direct. OMFG. Everyone loved the script!!!\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tI collected unemployment. I started a YouTube channel (The Cross-Eyed Chef), and I wrote a memoir,\u00a0Supah Ritz. But more and more, my calls to Hollywood went unreturned, and it became clear that despite all the kind words about my work, I could not pay the rent (and college tuition for my 18-year-old) on praise alone.<\/p>\n
\n\tIt was a fast and demoralizing descent, but one I suppose I had always seen coming. Over the years, the Grim Reaper of Hollywood had already come for so many of my colleagues \u2014 forcing them to pull their kids from private school and move home.\u00a0There was no way my number wouldn\u2019t one day come up.\u00a0Besides, Hollywood had always made me feel like I had no real value.\u00a0As an exec, you sit in your office trying to catch falling knives, wondering which one will deliver the fatal blow. You have almost no control over it. Being a writer is even worse. What\u2019s more, the town had made it clear to me that I didn\u2019t have the right stuff. As a studio chief once told me in a job interview, \u201cAffability counts for nothing in this town, Nick.\u201d What was I if not affable? When I lost my job and show, it just confirmed the way Hollywood had always made me feel. Worthless.<\/p>\n
\n\tThankfully, during that first year my brother-in-law \u2014 a master cabinetmaker and general contractor in Los Angeles (and one of the all-time great dudes in the pantheon of Dudedom) \u2014 approached me about overseeing the renovation of a house in Los Feliz that he had purchased as an investment. He was planning a gut renovation, and he wanted me to keep an eye on it, handle some of the administrative work around city permitting and make sure the crew had whatever supplies they might need for the day\u2019s planned work.\u00a0Knowing nothing about construction, save the few projects I\u2019d done at my own house, I said yes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tEvery day after writing for a couple hours, I stepped out of my effete world of character arcs and inciting incidents \u2014 coffee meetings and tracking boards \u2014 and into the manly world of construction.\u00a0\u00a0I won\u2019t kid you. It was intimidating. My brother-in-law\u2019s team is made up of guys from all over the globe with expertise in carpentry, masonry, painting and electric. They can hurl 90-pound bags of concrete into a truck bed with the same ease I employ to sip a latte.\u00a0\u00a0They speak a language of Romex wire and five-and-a-half-inch double-gang plates. I can\u2019t tell the difference between a jackhammer and a skill saw. I stumble around the job site \u2014 a minefield of half-built concrete footings and sewer trenches \u2014 in my khakis and Gazelles like a burlesque dancer navigating the ruins of the London Blitz.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tFrom the start, a big part of my job was being sent to Home Depot.\u00a0People of color won\u2019t go there these days because ICE has effectively suspended\u00a0habeas corpus\u00a0for anyone who even looks like they may be undocumented. But someone on every construction crew must endlessly ferry supplies from the lumber yard to the site. That job fell to me, and I sucked at it. After every run, Ramon \u2014 my construction foreman \u2014 would ream me out in broken English for buying the wrong shit.\u00a0\u00a0Even when he sent me pictures of exactly what he wanted, I somehow always still got it wrong.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cYou need to double check,\u201d Ramon implores. \u201cYou need to ask for help!\u201d\u00a0I try to swallow his criticism gracefully, but it\u2019s not easy.\u00a0\u201cMy show was nominated for an Emmy!!!\u201d I want to scream. But when I do voice my frustration, I have to then listen to the whole crew mock me in the Spanish language they know I can\u2019t understand.\u00a0I suppose if I had been hoping to feel less worthless, taking an entry-level position in a blue-collar industry where the language of choice is not my native tongue was probably the wrong move.<\/p>\n
\n\tStill, I clearly wasn\u2019t doing everything wrong, because three months into the job,\u00a0my brother-in-law\u00a0called me to the job site one morning and\u00a0offered me a promotion, tasking\u00a0me with taking a crew up to an iconic music venue in Hollywood to scrape and repaint the hulking landmark in anticipation of a grand unveiling to celebrate its fortieth year. He also asked me if I was down to help him oversee the rehabilitation of a Neutra jewel box in Bel Air, a Spanish two-bedroom in West Hollywood and the gut renovation of an Eichler split level in Thousand Oaks.\u00a0I wasn\u2019t in a place to turn the opportunity down.\u00a0My wife \u2014 the Emmy-winning costume designer Marie Schley \u2014 shattered her spine in a ski accident in December, so no one in this household has been earning any income for quite some time. Naturally, I said yes.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tNick Morton<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Subject<\/p>\n
\n\tPainting the music venue goes bad right out the gate. I don\u2019t know what I am doing, and I don\u2019t even know what to look for. It reminds me of my earliest visits to film sets when I\u2019d linger around video village praying no one asked me to do anything. Even the language barrier in construction reminds me how it felt to wander too close to the camera truck and overhear the grips chattering in exotic terms about c-stands and stingers, quarter-apples and Duvetyne.\u00a0I try to employ the same strategies I used back then: look attentive, stay positive and be patient knowing it will all eventually start to make sense. Still, I somehow miss the fact that our stucco team \u2014 as they scrape and patch the venue\u2019s walls \u2014 leave drippings under every surface they touch.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tOne afternoon \u2014 after my team has left the site \u2014 the guy who runs the club\u2019s VIP room tells me there\u2019s stucco on his staircase. \u201cGet a mop and clean it up.\u201d He tells me. \u201cNow! Tobey and Leo are coming.\u201d I don\u2019t have a mop, so I find myself at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday on my hands and knees in the blistering L.A. sun using my own T-shirt to scrape stucco from the club\u2019s decrepit steps. \u201cI met Leo, once,\u201d I think to myself, \u201cat Edward Norton\u2019s birthday party at the Wattles Mansion. Courtney Love invited me. And look at me, now!\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tI want to scream out in frustration.\u00a0I want to cry. I am so angry that Hollywood has reduced me to this level of desperation.\u00a0All the favors I doled out when I was in a position to do so have gone unreciprocated in my darkest hour \u2014 my direct pleas for help treated as the humorous pangs of a spoiled child. Why is nobody returning my calls!? How could the end of my 30-year career find me scrubbing floors? Why wasn\u2019t I taken more seriously by my peers? Was I too haughty? Did I not sleep around enough?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tI feel like a fool for ever believing in myself, and I want to take my stupid bucket and knock the Hailey Bieber smoothie right out of the hands of every smug development exec in town. But on some level, I also feel this is exactly what I deserve. It\u2019s the penance I\u2019ve wrought for my incompetence, my indifference and my failure to attack the biz with requisite psychosis assuming my privilege would somehow see me through.\u00a0\u00a0Hollywood is telling me where I belong.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd where I belong, it turns out, is where I began this story \u2014 in Aisle 18 at Home Depot on Sunset at 5:45 in the morning.<\/p>\n
\n\tAfter I finish shopping, I\u2019m loading my supplies into my trunk when I hear a plaintive voice offering help. I assume it\u2019s one of the many day laborers looking for work, and I say, \u201cNo, thanks,\u201d without looking up. But then I feel a hand smack my back and when I turn around I\u2019m greeted not a laborer but the toothy grin of an old TV writer friend.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d he asks incredulously.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tI\u2019m caught off guard. Stammering, I answer, \u201cThis is what I do, now \u2014 for a living.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s the first time I\u2019ve revealed to anyone in the industry what\u2019s become of my life.\u00a0I\u2019m embarrassed, and I feel my bottom lip quiver like I might burst into tears. But when I look up to meet his gaze, I see something there I\u2019ve never seen before when talking about my projects or my pitches or my career. I\u2019m not even sure what it is.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cGood for you,\u201d he says, sizing me up as if seeing me for the very first time. \u201cThat\u2019s what my dad did growing up!\u201d\u00a0And I realize the look on his face is one I\u2019ve rarely seen from Hollywood. It\u2019s respect.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAs I pull out of the Home Depot, I experience a kind of spiritual reconstitution as I feel the many parts that make up my psyche \u2014 father, comic, husband, Deadhead, tennis maniac and now \u201cconstruction worker\u201d \u2014 flow back into the strange amalgam that is Nick Morton. Perhaps I am not something less for this unlikely turn my life has taken \u2014 for my determination to not go broke waiting for a call that may never come. Perhaps, even in the act of running around this wild city, working on a team of guys from all walks of life and meeting the kinds of people you tend to ignore when ensconced in your Hollywood bubble, I am becoming something more.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWhen I arrive at the job site, my crew is oblivious to the beatific transformation I\u2019ve just undergone. The plaster compound\u2019s not right, and I didn\u2019t get the correct tape. I thought \u201cfrog\u201d tape was just a cute idiom for green drywall tape.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tI don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll ever master my new construction gig. I\u2019m pretty sure I will never understand what I did so wrong to make me fail at my earlier job, writing for Hollywood.\u00a0All I do know is that after six months of construction, my skin has cleared up, I\u2019ve lost 12 pounds, and I sleep like an adolescent boy. I\u2019ve learned a crazy fuck-ton about re-bar and sewer lines and Simpson ties and mortar.\u00a0I can strap a thousand pounds of cut lumber to the roof of my truck with barely a second thought.\u00a0I\u2019ve grown one serious set of man balls, and I take shit from no one.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWhile there\u2019s no glory in this work \u2014 no red-carpet ceremony awaiting us at the end of the year \u2014 there\u2019s no bowing and scraping, either. I\u2019m not begging for an opportunity to prove my worth. On some days,\u00a0when I\u2019m bombing up to Bel Air in my beat-up old truck,\u00a0\u00a0mariachi music blaring from the radio, the grate of the old F-150 scraping the street shrubs and sending gusts of sweet lavender billowing into my cab, I wonder why I would ever ask for more.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tSure, I make an hourly wage, but I\u2019m wanted, here. I\u2019m valued. It\u2019s a feeling I rarely experienced in Hollywood, and sometimes it\u2019s enough to make me believe I will never go back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s 5:45 a.m. on a Tuesday, and the Home Depot on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood is already bustling.\u00a0\u00a0I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":541962,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,186773,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-541961","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-life-after-hollywood","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/541962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}